Today’s teens have grown up online. They socialize online. They do homework online. And they definitely get their news online. But because young people are so comfortable with the internet, it often doesn’t occur to them to question the sources or motivations behind the stories they are reading—and passing along to their friends.
Now a San Mateo history teacher is making national news by teaching his students how to think critically about online information and spot a “fake news” story when they read one. William Colglazier, an AP U.S. History teacher at Aragon High School, says the genesis of the class came from a colleague who was doing a study at Stanford on “civic online reasoning.” The two-year study found that, “Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak.”
Most middle school students in the study could not tell the difference between an ad and a news story, and most high schoolers did not question data that came from a political action committee. Even college students found highly partisan websites to be trustworthy just because they had a URL that ended in “.org”. “In every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation,” according to the report.
The good news is that, according to Colglazier, once teens realize they’ve been duped, they are adamant about getting the tools to tell truth from fiction. “It angers them because they want their opinion to have validity, but to do so, they know intuitively they need reliable, persuasive evidence,” he explains. “But they need some pointers on how to find that evidence and how to spot when others use poor argumentation.”
Some of the pointers that Colglazier offers his students include: moving off the site to find more information about the site and/or the author’s motivations; looking past the first hits in a google search, even going so far as to look at the second or third page of results; and going beyond the “About Us” page on a website to find out more about the organization behind the news story.
Colglazier has tips for parents as well. He says its a good idea for parents to be “friends” with their kids on social media to see what stories they are sharing. He also suggested parents watch their teens as they search for something online and ask questions like, “Why did you click on that?” and “Do you trust this information?” “Those probing questions can lead to habits of mind the kids form about how to think critically about processes that were once deemed perfunctory,” he said.
Colglazier shared some of his curriculum with teens nationwide in a recent Teen Vogue story. He joked that he hopes the story buys him “some street cred” when he passes out difficult assignments, but more seriously he would like his students to see the article as a model for expressing their own opinions about the topics that are important to them.
Overall, Colglazier hopes that the kids in his class and those who read the story online take away some real knowledge about thinking critically when confronted with a story they read online. The alternative does not bode well for his students, or for the future of our country. “The internet is both beautiful and horrifying,” he says. “Gone are the days of publishing companies, librarians and teachers being the gatekeepers of knowledge. Everyone is a publicist now. So if real versus fake cannot be discerned, people can pray on others’ fears and misunderstandings with scary consequences.”
Emily Landes has a six-year-old, a toddler and a pretty severe sleep deficit.